]]>Suspicious about the origins of an article you’re reading online? A new browser extension and website, Churnalism U.S., claims to help detect plagiarism by comparing web content to Wikipedia and a database of press releases.

Churnalism was built by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that aims to make government more transparent and accountable, and Media Standards Trust, a U.K.-based nonprofit that advocates for transparency in news. The organizations previously created a U.K. version of Churnalism that compares web content to articles from the U.K. national press and the BBC.

“Here at Sunlight, we’re increasingly interested in tracking not just the flow of money in politics, but the flow of ideas, whether in legislation or floor speeches or news articles,” Sunlight Labs director Tom Lee said in a statement. “When we learned of what Media Standards Trust developed, it seemed natural for us to help them bring it to the U.S. news consumer.”

Because Churnalism U.S. is only searching Wikipedia and press releases, it doesn’t detect “classic” forms of plagiarism — an author copying another author’s original content from somewhere else on the web or in a printed work. Churnalism doesn’t pick up (yes, I checked) Atlantic writer Nate Thayer’s failure to credit his sources, for example, or Jonah Lehrer’s self-borrowing. For that, you’ll have to use a paid tool like Turn It In. But Churnalism plans to open up its API soon so that users can add more sources.

]]>Nate Thayer, the writer who touched off a debate this week about how freelancers are compensated, found himself embroiled in another controversy on Friday when he was accused of plagiarizing large parts of the piece that The Atlantic wanted him to re-work for free. In his defence, Thayer and his editor said links weren’t included in the original version due to an editing error, a mistake they later corrected. This failed to satisfy some of the writer’s critics, however, including the author of the piece that Thayer based some of his reporting on.

If nothing else, the incident helps reinforce just how blurry the line is between plagiarism and sloppy attribution — and also how the the web makes it easier to provide attribution via hyperlinks, but at the same time makes it harder to define what is plagiarism or content theft and what isn’t.

Is a small link to the source enough?

Even as Duns was writing his blog post about this incident of plagiarism, however, links began to appear in the Thayer piece, including a link to Zeigler’s original story. To Duns, this was evidence that the author was trying to cover his tracks, but in a comment to Columbia Journalism Review, NKNews editor Tad Farrell said that the lack of links was due to an editing error and that the site added them as soon as it could. Thayer vehemently denied that he was a plagiarist or that he intended to leave out the attribution.

So all’s well that ends well, right? In a follow-up post, the CJR’s Sara Morrison said that Duns clearly jumped to the wrong conclusions (since at least one of those who provided a quote that Duns questioned confirmed that they had in fact talked to Thayer for his piece). Duns wasn’t buying it, however, saying the attribution and links were only added later under protest. As he put it:

“Even hyperlinking to such a huge lift without mentioning the publication or author at all would have been something of a stretch – it’s a hell of a lot of material taken directly to cite with just one bolded word.”

Interestingly enough, Zeigler wasn’t all that satisfied either: although he said he wasn’t prepared to call Thayer a plagiarist, he didn’t think a couple of small links were enough to give him the appropriate attribution for his work. As he put it: “I don’t think just highlighting a few words of type in a different color necessarily qualifies as a proper attribution,” adding that his story “took a lot of work and a lot of man hours” to report and write.

The problem is that while adding hyperlinks is a great way of avoiding a charge of plagiarism — something that might have helped Fox News opinion writer Juan Williams and other alleged plagiarists — there is no accepted protocol for how or where to add those links, or how much content someone can cut and paste into their story or blog post without crossing the line from borrowing into plagiarism or copyright infringement.

How much content is too much to take?

This is also the root of the controversy over what some call the “over-aggregation” by sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider, where large chunks of stories from other sites — and in some cases, the entire story or post — is published, along with a “via” link somewhere at the bottom of the post. Other blogs, including The Verge and Engadget, have been criticized in the past for burying links to the original source of the content they reproduce, to try and disguise what they have borrowed.

And if you broaden the lens even further, a similar problem is at the root of the fight that Google has been up against in country after country over its use of excerpts from news stories in Google News — stories that come from newspapers and other traditional sources. Germany has passed a law to control the use of such excerpts, even those as short as a single word, and in other countries like France and Belgium, those traditional outlets have sued Google to try and force payment for that content.

Google’s defence is that it links prominently to the original source, and this drives traffic to the publisher’s site, which is fundamentally the same argument that Business Insider and Huffington Post and others use to defend their aggregation of content. But those whose content is used argue, as Brian Morrissey of Digiday did in a back-and-forth with Business Insider founder Henry Blodget, that taking their content produces far more value for the aggregator than it provides in return.

So it seems that when it comes to making use of someone else’s content, linking as a way of providing attribution and credit is enough — except when it isn’t.

On Monday Max Schrems, the self-styled scourge of Facebook who has forced several changes in the way the social network treats people’s data in Europe, published a comparison table (PDF warning) that shows how entire passages have been copied, word-for-word, from lobbying documents into proposed amendments to the new regulation. The sources of these texts include Amazon and eBay, as well as the American Chamber of Commerce.

Amazon in particular seems to have had its proposed wording taken very seriously by some parliamentarians, who have copied wholesale the cloud provider’s proposals about reducing the responsibilities of non-EU cloud providers when hosting EU citizens’ data (the original proposals would, for example, force the cloud providers to remove data about certain individuals if those individuals want to be digitally “forgotten”).

But this is an unfinished project, and there’s still work to be done. What’s particularly entertaining is the way in which the privacy activists are tracking the similarities between the lobbying documents – which we know about largely through leaks – and the new amendments.

It’s being done through a website called LobbyPlag, in which the “Plag” is short for “plagiarism.” The idea was previously used for a site called GuttenPlag, which people used to collate examples of former German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg plagiarizing other people’s work in his doctoral thesis (zu Guttenberg subsequently resigned before being inexplicably made an EU digital freedom champion).

Here’s a screencast of how LobbyPlag works, courtesy of OpenDataCity, the German data journalism outfit that’s supplying the technology:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqzPxjiNee8&w=560&h=315]

I think it’s fair to say that leaked documents plus crowdsourced analysis can make for a pretty potent combination. Whether that mix will have any effect against well-funded lobbying, though, is another matter. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a simple U.S.-versus-Europe thing, by the way. As recent research has shown, actual consumers on both sides of the pond have similar expectations about data privacy — both sides want more of it.

“Certain companies will always be willing and able to throw millions of dollars behind lobbying efforts to ensure that new legislation doesn’t interfere with their business models — particularly if those models are dependent on invading people’s rights to privacy and data protection,” Anna Fielder, trustee of UK-based Privacy International, said in a statement.

“We would hope that MEPs are taking all sides of the argument into account when making law, not just the richest and most powerful corporate interests.”

]]>Updated: It seems a week can’t go by without a new incident of plagiarism by some prominent journalist, and this week it’s Margaret Wente, a star columnist with one of Canada’s national newspapers, who has been found guilty of using content from other journalists and academics without crediting them. As others have in similar cases, Wente says it was a simple mistake, although she has apparently been disciplined (in some unknown fashion) by the paper’s editor-in-chief. But there is a much larger point here than just the fact that journalists can get sloppy, and that the internet is a fact-checking machine unlike any other: Just like Jonah Lehrer and Fareed Zakaria before her, Wente’s behavior — and the newspaper’s lackluster response to it — speaks volumes about the flaws of print and the corresponding benefits of online media and journalism.

As I’ve argued before, part of the problem with print media — and something that often spills over into the digital versions of those media — is that it is incapable of providing the kind of credit that the web can when a writer is making use of someone else’s thoughts or words. A simple hyperlink or two would arguably have made Wente’s behavior, and that of many others, much less open to criticism. But the reality is that there are also deeper problems than just a failure to link.

Summarizing content without credit is a losing strategy

One of those problems is that the job of newspaper columnists — and analysts like Zakaria, and pop-culture interpreters like Jonah Lehrer — has always been to take in content from elsewhere and synthesize it (or remix it, to use a popular metaphor) and then hopefully make a point of some kind. Doing this actually made some sense when print newspapers and TV shows were the primary method of information delivery, but rehashing what a couple of other columnists or pundits said without giving them credit simply doesn’t work as well any more — too many people notice.

Full disclosure: I should note that I am about as conflicted as any writer could possibly be about this case: I worked at the Globe and Mail for more than 15 years, as a reporter and a columnist (as well as the paper’s first social-media editor), and was originally hired by none other than Margaret Wente, who was then running the newspaper’s business section. I have worked closely with her and Sylvia Stead — who is now the paper’s public editor, and was the first one to respond to the accusations — and with John Stackhouse, who is now the editor-in-chief and has written a public statement saying that Wente’s behavior did not meet the newspaper’s standards.

To sum up for those who haven’t been following it, Wente has been accused a number of times over the past several years of using content from other journalists (including some from the New York Times), and one case in particular from 2009 blew up this week — after a blog post by Carol Wainio, a frequent critic of Wente’s, got picked up by media industry observers and was circulated on Twitter. According to Wainio’s research, which others have verified, the columnist used a number of verbatim phrases from a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen newspaper (which is owned by the Globe’s main competitor, Postmedia) as well as an academic.

The newspaper was silent on the charges for some time, until public editor Sylvia Stead wrote what some critics have complained was a mealy-mouthed response, in which she referred to Wainio dismissively as “an anonymous blogger” (even though Stead has had numerous interactions with her in the past over similar issues) and downplayed most of the errors that now appear to have been made. After attacks on the Globe from a number of sources — including the former chairman of the journalism school at Ryerson University in Toronto — the paper published the response from Stackhouse (which referred to “taking appropriate action”) as well as a column from Wente that stopped short of being an outright apology but attempted to provide an explanation for her behavior.

The media playing field has been levelled

In many ways, the nature of the Globe’s response has probably fanned the flames of criticism rather than dampened them: not surprisingly, the column from Wente is defensive, but it and the responses from Stead and Stackhouse also fail to deal with the fact that there have been other similar incidents in the past, some of which appear to have been brushed under the carpet. The general attitude seems to be shock that anyone would listen to a mere blogger on such matters, rather than trusting the Globe to do what is right — a classic response from a traditional media gatekeeper that doesn’t realize the playing field has been levelled.

[tweet https://twitter.com/JesseBrown/status/250427171334651905]

As Craig Silverman at Poynter notes, this kind of response does little to help build or maintain (or repair) the trust that readers have in the paper, something that is of crucial importance in an era when readers have dozens, if not hundreds, of other sources they can go to.

Like every other traditional media outlet, they are going to have to get used to the idea of no longer being on a pedestal, no longer being the default choice for content — and no longer able to get away with simply rewriting what others have said and passing it off as original thought. As Greg Beato at Reason notes, we are living in a “golden age for fact checking,” when anyone with a web browser can check any statement against most of recorded history, and that imposes a duty on media entities that goes beyond the simple admission of error. Transparency may not be pleasant, but it is the only realistic option available.

]]>What do Fareed Zakaria, Jonah Lehrer and Gawker Media have in common? In different ways, the incidents that have thrust all three into the news recently help to show the power of the simple hyperlink, which Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed along with the rest of the web a little over two decades ago. Zakaria is the Newsweek editor and CNN talk-show host who was recently sanctioned for plagiarism, and Jonah Lehrer is the former New Yorker writer who was banished from the magazine for similar crimes. Gawker Media, meanwhile, shows us the flip side of those two coins: the New York-based blog network recently escaped from a hefty defamation lawsuit in part because it recognizes the power of the hyperlink.

Plagiarism is just inefficient hyperlinking

One of the themes that has been brought up repeatedly in stories about both Zakaria and Lehrer is the idea that they have been overworked as a result of media multi-tasking. Stories about the Lehrer incident, for example, note that he was writing books and had a packed public-speaking schedule while also trying to write a blog for the New Yorker, and Zakaria made the same link by saying he plans to cut down on his responsibilities — implying that this was to blame for him mixing up his notes from the New Yorker piece with his own writing (he also said he recently hired an assistant).

But I think Box.net CEO Aaron Levie put his finger on a big part of the problem in a tweet he posted recently, in which he said plagiarism “is just really inefficient hyperlinking.”

[tweet https://twitter.com/levie/status/234032994644549632]

Although he probably just intended to be witty, I think Levie makes a good point. Plagiarism is defined as the attempt to “steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one’s own,” and it is the last part of that definition that is the most important one. It isn’t so much that a writer like Lehrer or Zakaria takes information from someone else and uses it in a column — plenty of writers do that, and as the media world has exploded thanks to social tools such as blogs and Twitter, this phenomenon has only become more commonplace. But neither of them gave credit to the source of the content they used, and that was the real crime.

This is exactly the same kind of argument that gets made about news aggregators or blogs that do a poor job of crediting the source of the content they are aggregating. As Jeff Jarvis has argued in a series of recent posts, since copying is rampant on the internet, we should be more focused on ways of giving credit to the source or creator of that content. And what better way to give credit than by linking prominently to its originator? This is just another reason why links are the lifeblood of the internet, as I argued in a recent post about the back-and-forth between bloggers and the traditional media over the latter never giving credit to the former.

Linking also provides a great defence

If either Zakaria or Lehrer had been more devoted to the idea of linking to sources, they might have spent more time making note of where the information they were using came from, so that they could include a link — in the same way that academics routinely cite footnotes to back up their claims. Would they still have tried to pass those sections off as their own? Perhaps. As my paidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted about Lehrer, some of his behavior was likely a result of the pressure to be a public intellectual. But if either one is sincere about how their plagiarism was an honest mistake, paying more attention to linking might help.

And if anyone needs evidence of how a consistent policy of linking to sources can be a positive thing, they should look no further than the Gawker case: the blog network was sued by a company for defamation, based on a piece that the tech blog Gizmodo wrote about its products. In a decision that acquitted the media company of this charge, the court said that part of the rationale for its ruling came from the use of links in the Gizmodo piece, which provided ample evidence of what the post was referring to. As the court decision put it:

“Having ready access to the same facts as the authors, readers were put in a position to draw their own conclusions about Redmond and his ventures and technologies… Statements are generally considered to be nonactionable opinion when the facts supporting the opinion are disclosed.”

David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal book The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argued in a post about the journalistic principle of objectivity that “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” In other words, when you have the ability to link to information that supports your conclusions, it’s easier to get away with being subjective, because readers are able to follow the links and decide for themselves whether you are credible.

I think the same principle applies to plagiarism: it is something that occurs when a medium doesn’t allow — or at least doesn’t encourage — links to original sources. The internet may make it more likely that someone copies content from another, but it also makes it easier to fix.

In recent days, Berlin clone factory Rocket Internet has had a register-your-interest page up for its new Nigerian site, Sabunta. It’s a clothing store and, once launched, it will probably look like Rocket’s many other Zappos clones.

I know it was there – I looked at it this morning, along with the still-up Facebook page. But then I looked again later and it was gone. And then I realised why.

The Samwer brothers’ favourite sources of, ahem, “inspiration” include not only Zappos and Amazon but also Fab.com. And wouldn’t you know it, today the German publication Gruenderszene outed the fact that the Sabunta landing page actually contained Fab.com code.

As Gruenderszene quite correctly pointed out, it’s a mystery why Rocket needed to copy this stuff. After all, its own copy of Fab, Bamarang has been in operation for a while now, so why not just take the code from there?

You’d also think Rocket might have learned from the last time this happened.

Two months ago, an eagle-eyed reader of the terms and conditions attached to Rocket’s Pinterest clone, Pinspire, noted that one section of the cut’n’paste job still referred to Pinterest.

Unoriginal but logical

Snarking aside, it is interesting to see Rocket finally make its Nigerian play. When I was researching our already-out-of-date map of the company’s global spread in April, I noticed several registrations of Rocket brand names as URLs for the country.

As I pointed out in the ensuing comments conversation, Rocket’s frenzy of activity in South Africa pointed to the establishment of a sub-Saharan base there. Now, apart from Sabunta’s coy appearance and hurried disappearance, reports are emerging of another Rocket Amazon clone getting set to launch in Nigeria this month.

Africa’s three biggest economies are South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt… and Rocket’s now in all three.

To some extent, the big names of e-commerce should not be surprised to see Rocket eating their African lunch when they themselves don’t bother to address the continent’s growing middle classes. But, on the other hand, they don’t deserve to see their code copied either.

]]>Plagiarized editions for sale in Amazon’s Kindle store show how the company is still adapting to the world of original content creation. At the same time, the stolen books may also present a test of the retailer’s ability to rely on a widely used legal shield that protects content sites from being accused of copyright infringement.

Amazon’s plagiarism problem came to light again last week after Fast Company reported that many of the bestselling self-published “authors” in the Kindle store were actually copycats who uploaded other writers’ e-books under different titles. Using the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, the copycats are able to hijack the sales of the original authors by simply copying and reselling their works.

Spammy and stolen e-books — either plagiarized copies of copyrighted works by other authors, or books thrown together from “private label rights” (PLR) content, which can be bought very cheaply online and quickly formatted into multiple e-books — have long been a problem in the Kindle store. We don’t have data on how many of these titles are currently for sale or how widespread the problem is.

“We’ve found that the folks spreading PLR are also more likely to be plagiarists of real book content” as well, says Mark Coker, the CEO of e-book publishing platform Smashwords (a competitor of Amazon’s self-publishing platform). In many instances, Coker says, plagiarized and PLR content banned by Smashwords still appears in the Kindle and Nook stores. He says those stores don’t vet content as thoroughly as Smashwords does.

Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) provides an e-mail address that plagiarism victims can use to demand that an offending e-book be removed. In response to our questions on plagiarized content in the Kindle store, the company provided the following statement:

Since the launch of Kindle, we have worked steadily to build processes to detect and remove books that either violate copyright or don’t improve the customer experience. Over time, we’ve rejected or removed thousands of such offending titles, and we expect to keep improving our approach to protect the service we provide to both Kindle readers and authors/publishers.

Update: When we submitted a list of questions to Amazon via e-mail, we asked them if they use screening software to screen for unauthorized copies. Instead of responding to the individual questions, the company provided the above statement. An Amazon spokeswoman called me this morning, however, and told me that Amazon does employ screening software. However, the company would not specify the kind of software it uses; whether it is screening for PLR or plagiarized content; or any other details. Amazon does not, however, employ software to screen for unauthorized copies — which is perhaps surprising given that

Amazon would not elaborate on what software it is using or if it resembles the electronic anti-plagiarism tools are used by nearly every university and by publishers as well. This type of software works by comparing a newly submitted document against a database of existing texts and flagging submissions that contain a high degree of overlap.

Robert Creutz, an executive with anti-plagiarism service Ithenticate, says his company’s software takes between 45 seconds and a few minutes to screen a text. Creutz says clients include book publishers like John Wiley and journal publisher Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK).

Screening software is also used by video sites like YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) and by document sharing site Scribd.

But while it appears that Amazon could easily employ a filter to protect its authors’ works, it may be under no legal duty to do so.

The Kindle Store as Safe Harbor

Illegal copies are hardly unique to Amazon, of course. The Kindle store is just the latest in a long line of forums, from Grokster to YouTube, through which third parties have offered works without the creators’ permission.

Most times, the websites are not legally at fault. The law protects them by granting “safe harbor” status — a shield that helps internet companies avoid liability when a third party posts copyrighted material on their sites.

Websites can lose their safe-harbor status, however, if they are found to control and directly profit from the unauthorized activities. The meaning of these terms is not entirely clear, though, and is part of a high-profile court case between YouTube and Viacom (NYSE: VIA).

Hillel Parness, a copyright attorney at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, said that courts have found that a website has no duty to act unless it knows about a specific infringement. This means that Amazon is likely not responsible for the plagiarism unless an author can show the company knew a particular title was plagiarized. But Parness adds,

“If authors decide to challenge Amazon, they may choose to focus on the revenue Amazon enjoys on the sale of every e-book. Or perhaps they will question the fairness of placing the burden on authors to monitor Amazon’s e-book marketplace for books that infringe their own. Indeed, one may question if self-published authors even have the practical ability to do so.”

Amazon also stands out because it is a retailer making a direct commission from the unauthorized copies — unlike other safe harbor situations in which a site makes money indirectly via advertising.

In deciding if a site is shielded, courts will also look at its response to copyright complaints. Some plagiarized authors have reported Amazon was slow to take action — a situation that could place it on shaky ground.

Overall, Amazon’s response to the plagiarism problem reflects its status as a relative newcomer to the publishing game. This will no doubt change as the company continues to expand its presence from retailer to content creator.

]]>The Hartford Courant, which provoked a lawsuit over an ill-fated aggregation experiment, quietly settled the case last week. The settlement is a vindication for the small newspaper that sued, but the outcome also means that media outlets will not get a further chance to test-drive the controversial “hot news” doctrine in court.

The fuss began in 2009 when the Courant, owned by bankrupt Tribune Co., appointed an “aggregation editor” to compensate for cuts to its local news desk. For several months, the Hartford paper took to siphoning stories from smaller competitors, including “North-Central Connecticut’s Hometown Newspaper,” the Journal Inquirer. The paper sued, saying its bigger rival had taken its stories about local water and education issues and “reproduced them in substance” on the Courant website, sometimes without attribution.

In its claim, the Journal Inquirer accused the Courant of not only copyright infringement but of stealing its news. This type of “hot news” claim was first recognized in 1918 when the Supreme Court found that the Associated Press could stop the International News Service from rewriting its accounts of World War I. The latter’s practice of wiring rewritten AP reports to the west coast sometimes resulted in the INS beating the AP to press on its own stories.

The hot news doctrine shrunk dramatically in the twentieth century but suddenly took on new importance last year after a New York court ruled that Barclays bank was entitled to stop a financial site, Flyonthewall.com, from reporting on the recommendations it sold to its clients. Numerous news organizations led by the AP filed court briefs to support the bank during appeal proceedings. The bank and the news outlets ultimately lost, however, after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling and set out a difficult five-part test that a company must pass to establish a property right in “hot news.”

The Hartford Courant aggregation case provided a new opportunity to test the boundaries of the “hot news” rules. The paper had argued that the Journal Inquirer’s stories did not qualify as hot news and that its aggregations amounted to “fair use” under copyright law. Those arguments will not be tested, however, because of the settlement, the term of which were not disclosed.

The episode attracted national attention in journalism circles and also resulted in the Courant publisher writing a letter of apology to the paper’s readers. The Journal Inquirer has a detailed account of the events and the settlement here.

]]>In the coverage of New York Times writer Zachary Kouwe, who resigned recently amid accusations of plagiarism, much has been said about the demands of writing for the always-on web, and how this might have contributed to Kouwe’s missteps -– something the writer himself referred to in a discussion of the incident as described by NYT public editor Clark Hoyt. But Reuters columnist Felix Salmon was the first to put his finger on what I think is the real culprit: a lack of respect for the culture of the web, specifically for the value and necessity of the link.

Kouwe describes in an interview with the New York Observer how he felt under pressure to cover offbeat news items for the blog as they came up, and would pull together bits and pieces of coverage from elsewhere on a story and then rewrite them into his own post or story. This, he says, is how the plagiarism occurred: by not realizing which pieces of text he had pulled from somewhere else, and which he had written himself. As Salmon notes, what a blogger would do in this case (or at least a good blogger) is link to other sources of material on the same topic rather than rewriting them:

Anybody who can or would write such a thing has no place working on a blog. If it’s clear who had a story first, then the move into the age of blogs has made it much easier to cite who had it first: blogs and bloggers should be much more generous with their hat-tips and hyperlinks than any print reporter can be.

Linking isn’t just a matter of etiquette or geek culture (although it is both of those things); it’s a fundamental aspect of writing for the web. In fact, the ability to link is arguably the most important feature of the web as a communications or information-delivery mechanism. Before the web came along, journalism and other forms of media were like islands unto themselves, each trying to pretend that it existed alone, without any connection to what came before it. Links are like bridges and roads, allowing these islands to connect to each other, and making it easier for readers to draw connections.

Links also make it easier for readers to understand a writer’s perspective, and thus are an important tool in disclosing bias (in an eloquent discussion of how transparency is the new objectivity, author David Weinberger said that objectivity was something “you rely on when your medium can’t do links”).

Unfortunately, however, those bridges and roads can also take readers elsewhere, and if your business depends (or you think it depends) on keeping those readers on your island, you might think twice about building that bridge. So you might recreate information that exists elsewhere, in the hope that readers won’t notice. Is that part of what pushed Kouwe to rewrite material for the blog? Salmon suggests that it might be. And if it did, the NYT writer is far from alone.

That’s not to say web-only sites are free from this kind of behavior. Some news sites have become notorious for either rewriting an entire post from a competitor, or excerpting huge portions of the content on their own sites, with just a small link that credits the original source. The economic incentive is the same, whether it’s a web-only outlet or a traditional media web site: to aggregate page views and sell them to advertisers. But at least most web-only sites that do this tend to include links (even if they are in small print at the bottom). Similar behavior in print publications usually comes with no links at all.

Plenty of mainstream publications have avoided linking out until relatively recently, or at least have linked as little as possible. The New York Times is in that group, despite its status as a leader in so much of what we think of as “new media” online. For a long time, the newspaper’s web site would only link (when it linked at all) to internal NYT topic pages. It has started adding more links to external sites, but many stories still contain no links at all. Lots of newspapers do the same thing.

In some cases this is a technical issue, in that print-based content management systems often make it difficult to include links. But an even bigger part of the problem is cultural. Traditional print media workers are used to thinking of themselves as the be-all and end-all of information, the only source that anyone could possibly need (despite the fact that many stories are based either wholly or in part on reporting by wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters), and are loathe to give anyone else credit. That has to change.

The ethic of the web, as Jeff Jarvis repeatedly points out, is “do what you do best, and link to the rest.” If Kouwe or his employer had fully embraced that approach, he might not have had to apologize for anything.

Wrapping up another seven days and bringing you the freshest picks, it’s time for this week’s App Store Roundup.

Tom Reetsman kicked off the week by calling Technologizer’s Ed Oswald out on an article he wrote about MobileMe, the general gist of it being that Oswald canceled MobileMe, only to lament the disappearance of his data.

Moving on, let’s talk about apps, this week I’ve been looking at ExZeus, Aggravate Nails on Chalkboard, Audio Memos Free – The Voice Recorder, Epiphany Recorded and Rolando Lite.ExZeus ($5.99)
Giant robots, laser cannons, alien invasions, explosions — these are inherently exciting things. Distill these things down to videogame form and there’s a good chance you’re on to a winner. ExZeus finds you playing a robot with a laser cannon causing explosions while fighting off an alien invasion: this is hyperbolic space shooter action at its best. The gameplay captures old Sega classics like Space Harrier while the rainbow gun metal 3D graphics bring Transformers instantly to mind (plagiaricious!).

Audio Memos Free – The Voice Recorder (free)
On to serious stuff then, as we take a look at this voice recording tool. There’s a bevy of options available to those looking for a memo recorder for the iPhone. For those still searching for a audio recording tool, this free, ad-supported app is a good starting point. The app can use either the built in iPhone mic, or the headset mic, records in up to 44100 kHz and even has a scrub tool — letting you skip to the essential parts of each recording.

Epiphany Recorder (free)
While Audio Memos Free is a traditional voice recorder app, Epiphany Recorder has a unique angle on the whole memo recording concept. The idea behind the app is that often you’ll hear something worth recording and, before you get the opportunity to capture it, the moment will be gone. To combat missing those all-important moments, Epiphany Recorder captures the previous two minutes of audio from the moment you hit record. Of course, you have to keep the app open, but it’s still a commendable way of solving an issue for students, journalists and seminar attendees everywhere.

Rolando Lite (free)
Released last year, Rolando is a fantastic tilt ‘n’ touch based puzzler for the iPhone and touch. I wrote up a comprehensive and complimentary review for it a couple of months back, stating that Rolando is an essential for iPhone and touch gamers, “… what we have here is the benchmark for what a complete iPhone (or touch) gaming experience could be and, furthermore, should be.” If you don’t have Rolando and you’ve never tried it, you’re now fresh out of excuses as Rolando Lite is a free demo containing the first few levels of the full game. Get it now!

Aggravate Nails on Chalkboard (free)
Wonderful, yet another way to simultaneously alienate your close friends while illustrating the fact that your state-of-the-art iPhone, with GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and all that digital jazz, is nothing more than a shiny digital whoopee cushion. Except this app is actually quite good, for starters, it knows its place in the pricing pantheon (next to worthless) and is free. And therefore worth the 5 minutes of unadulterated joy you’ll derive from watching your friends’ skin crawl as you screech your fingers down the iPhone’s screen.

Just One More Thing

I’ve noticed a fantastic new trend emerging over at the App Store. It all started two months ago when Olivier Bernal, a French iPhone app developer, decided to pinch stock photography from iStock Photo. Then a too-close-to-the-bone clone of Nintendo’s famous zapper game Duck Hunt appeared on the App Store, only to be pulled last week following a complaint from Nintendo.

It seems that app developers are already running out of original ideas and instead running rampant with other people’s copyrights. I picked three copyright infringing apps, released in the last week, that flaunt it like a middle-aged divorcee speeding round town in a second-hand Porsche with a “Single and Lovin’ It” bumper sticker.

First up is The Eggs, described by the developers as, “A simulation of a popular Soviet game ‘Electronica IM-02′ which was a clone of Nintendo’s Game&Watch series game ‘Egg’.” So, effectively, we’re talking about an iPhone simulation of a simulation of a game which, in itself, was an emulation of a classic Nintendo title.

There are several things I’m not sure about here; firstly, I’m not sure whether I correctly used simulation and emulation. Most importantly though, I’m not up on my Soviet copyright law — was the game originally infringing copyright? Or, in Soviet Russia, does copyright infringe you?

Then there’s Flipt – Heroes Edition, a traditional tile matching game that uses images culled from the Heroes TV series and is almost certainly not an official spinoff. The app description is a giveaway, “Find pairs of matching images all themed around the popular sitcom Heroes™.”

Because, of course, Heroes is indeed a sitcom. I’ve always thought that Sylar is the Chandler of the bunch. And, I particularly enjoy that the app description used the ™ symbol while totally infringing the trademark.

And I’ll skip straight to the point with CuBert — it’s a direct rip of classic Q*Bert, heck the character is exactly the same as the original retro hooter-nosed weirdo. To the guys at LagMac, the game’s developer, this may apparently be “… in homage to Q*Bert creators,” but it’s still a massive copyright infringing bag of profit-generating plagiarism.

How can the people behind these apps be smart enough to program a game for the iPhone and then actually get it on the App Store, but either have no concept of copyright or are simply just risking it? How can you be that smart and yet also that dumb?

I’ll leave you to ponder that final question and see you next Saturday for another App Store Roundup. In the meantime, let me know which apps you’ve been downloading in the comments.